Falling in Love with the Whole World

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East Coast Gather 2015

Whew, it’s been a couple of weeks of crazy prepping for and going to the annual OBOD East Coast Gather. There was more than a little bit of crafting overdrive between finishing an item for the silent auction, random ritual paraphernalia (painted stones, hag tapers), and making sure all the labyrinth supplies were packed.

Bear journal for the silent auction.

Hag taper, lighting the way from Bard to Ovate.

Sacred stone WIP (not posting the final, well, because, reasons).

Better bloggers than I (John Beckett, A Druid Way) have done excellent rundowns of the individual events of ECG, so I’ll not tread that ground again here. My experience of this year’s gathering can be summed up in the words “kindness” and “community”. There was an overwhelming amount of kindness: from Damh the Bard, who took time out of his busy schedule to play music with the kids, to John Beckett, who was willing to let me chew his ear off about polytheism and my Lady of Birds and Horses, to the young woman who kept an eye on my son so I could help with the Ovate initiations. A harvest of kindness is something to be proud of, indeed.

Very blurry Damh the Bard.

On the community end of things, earlier this year I came up with a slightly nutty idea of creating a labyrinth for folks to walk (more of this story may show up in the Order’s magazine, Touchstone). I probably could have done the whole thing myself; the beautiful thing was, I didn’t have to. The labyrinth was formed by over 330 LED color-changing tea lights, which had the (hopefully!) fae and fanciful effect of shift color and pattern as a person walked the path. Once the seed pattern was set, a small group of folks gathered to stuff candles into paper bags while the kids gathered up pebbles to keep them weighted down. Then, every night, a flock of volunteers descended to turn on the lights, and in the wee small hours of the morning, another crew gathered to turn them off. None of this was officially organized. It was an outpouring of spontaneous community spirit which was humbling to behold.

Labyrinth by day…

…labyrinth by night.

Every year it’s hard to leave Druid Camp, as my kid calls it. But far better to be sad at the parting than to be excited to leave! Next year, we won’t be having any guest speakers. We’ll be able to dig deep and focus on each other’s wisdom, and twine our roots more deeply across this land. I can hardly wait!